


Conflict of Interest

by fellowshipper



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, Dialogue Heavy, Humor, M/M, Snark, frostironfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 14:44:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellowshipper/pseuds/fellowshipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turned out, dating a very active super-villain presented a unique set of problems that weren’t nearly as sexy or interesting as Tony thought they would be. (Or, how Tony learned to stop worrying and tolerate the dating scene.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [viviantanner](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=viviantanner).



> Written for [viviantanner](http://viviantanner.tumblr.com/) as part of [frostironfest](frostironfest.tumblr.com). *bites fingernails* I hope you like it, and happy holidays to you!
> 
> *I also realized after going over the prompt again that I completely forgot to include a scene I wanted to put in. *facepalm* It doesn't change anything in this fic so it's not that big of a deal, but that scene might be added later or turned into a one-shot connected to this.

As it turned out, dating a very active super-villain presented a unique set of problems that weren’t nearly as sexy or interesting as Tony thought they would be.

He didn’t go into this relationship (if it could even charitably be called as much) expecting anything to be easy. To be honest, he didn’t go into it expecting anything but snark and morally questionable hookups. That seemed like a fair assumption, and Loki certainly didn’t appear to want anything more. As so often happened in Tony’s life, hatred turned to dislike, to indifference, to intrigue, to amusement, to interest, to fascination, to . . . well, he wouldn’t call it obsession, but that also wasn’t too far off the mark. Whatever it was, it was never supposed to extend beyond the bedroom (or the workshop, or one of his cars, or, on one memorable occasion, a completely fucked up shrine Loki built to himself in some Louisiana swamp, complete with human bones acquired from somewhere Tony didn’t want to think about and dead animals strung up in varying stages of decay – and if _that_ didn’t scare Tony off, there was no hope of his sanity or sense of self-preservation).

Regardless of the nature of their relationship (partnership, that was a better word), Tony approached it with the same casual guidelines he’d set for everyone else who wandered into his life and into his bed: get in, get off, get out. Don’t get attached, don’t look for anything more than a few hours of entertainment, then say goodbye and hopefully never cross paths again. He explicitly avoided picking up anyone who worked for the company – like Alicia in HR, a stunning blonde with the longest legs Tony had ever seen off a catwalk and which he frequently imagined wrapped around his hips, or Josh in marketing, a scruffy brunet who had made his interest _very_ clear at last year’s Christmas party. Besides the obvious harassment suits waiting to happen – which Pepper helpfully reminded him about every time she even suspected he was checking out one of his employees – there was little Tony dreaded more than having to interact with someone he’d slept with in any capacity that involved both parties still wearing clothes and not intending to remove them at any time.

Basically, Tony didn’t date. What was the point when all he wanted to know of anyone was what positions they liked? He didn’t need or want to know what they did for hobbies, where they’d gone to school, what kind of music they listened to, or how big of an asshole the ex was. He didn’t care, quite honestly, and it was easier and fairer to everyone involved if he avoided that situation entirely rather than make a half-assed and insulting attempt to even act like he cared.

And then Loki happened.

Some days Tony thought he should put that on a bumper sticker. Or his gravestone, but that was likely enough to occur that he didn’t want to encourage that kind of karma. Loki wasn’t a cuddler by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how often Tony wondered what it might be like to be the big spoon in a post-coital snuggle. They also weren’t big on pillow talk, unless Tony counted variations of “ow,” “you asshole,” and “what the fuck” (or, after the shrine incident, a very pointed “no, seriously, what the _actual_ fuck, Loki?” once Tony looked up to see a dead rat hanging from a tree limb directly overhead). But sometimes, more often than Tony was comfortable acknowledging, they talked. They teased and joked, traded insults, pushed to the brink of violence, and . . . yeah. Sometimes they spoke in broken fragments and hushed tones as though afraid the nightmares they discussed would overhear and come crawling from the shadows to drag them back. Other times they made long, rambling monologues punctuated by silence only when the speaker paused for a drink. They touched then, too, and sometimes it led to sex – which was invariably fast and angry and _perfect_  -- but it just as often ended there: a brush of hands, a barely-there kiss to a shoulder, a subtle shift in weight as one leaned against the other, and then Tony would crack a stupid joke or Loki would threaten him (and God, they were so predictable at times) and the moment would pass.

Tony found his thoughts increasingly, _infuriatingly_ turning to Loki at random times – inconvenient, bizarre, embarrassing times. He caught himself wondering while working on an upgraded plating system for the suit if Loki would have a better idea; he always did, the bastard, and it was always some mythical element from the deepest pit of some Narnia-like world, probably guarded by dragons and shit, because Loki’s best ideas were never exactly practical.

On the rare occasion Tony tried to cook for himself, he wondered if Loki would like what he made, if Loki had ever even tasted mustard, and he wished he could say he’d never made extra food just in case Loki showed up.

The most recent evidence of his semi-obsession was just the previous week. Tony whined and moaned his way through a long shower after spending most of the night being used as a baseball by a pack of Doombots. Every muscle ached, every movement was agony, and all he could think about was Loki. He would have smirked at Tony’s misery and scolded him for being careless and underestimating Dr. Doom’s abilities. The fantasy became real in Tony’s mind, Loki almost taking on a tangible form right there in the shower with him; the bath puff smoothing over his bruised skin was replaced by Loki’s hand, far more reverent and gentle than it ever was in reality. Tony’s head dropped back against the shower wall as he imagined that mouth fixing to his throat and sucking another dark splotch to the surface, one of dozens but for a much better reason. Loki moved down, leaving a trail of ice in his mouth’s wake even as Tony felt like his body would burst into flames.

At some point, the loofah fell to the ground, freeing up Tony’s hand. His eyes closed against the spray of the water and only opened again when his body jerked and he came with Loki’s name on his lips and a mess coating his hand. Cursing everything in existence, Tony shoved his hand under the shower head, then cranked the hot water in hopes the scalding heat would distract him from the ghostly image in his mind of Loki on his knees in front of him, a pink flush on those ridiculously high cheekbones, mouth open, lips wet, tongue out like a devotee taking communion –

No. Not going down that road again.

. . . Heh. Going down.

Tony groaned and dropped his head back onto the wall again, harder this time, almost hoping he’d knock himself out and wake up later once the water ran cold. At least then he could tell himself it was just another bender, food poisoning, a stroke – hell, _anything_ to avoid admitting that he’d actually fantasized about and jerked off over someone like he was a horny teenager all over again. He wasn’t sure if it was better or worse that it was over a god-alien-thing. He’d watched a lot of _Star Trek_ as a kid, after all.

Later that night, he consulted JARVIS with his dilemma while dismantling an ancient Corvette engine.

“What do you think, J?” he asked, rolling out from under the car and wiping motor oil and grease on his jeans as he dragged his hands across his thighs.

“It sounds as though you miss Master Loki.”

“I thought I changed your recognition software to refer to him as S.H.I.E.L.D. Subject A-17L?”

JARVIS hesitated for a fraction of a second, something almost like guilt creeping into his robotic voice. Which was silly and Tony was imagining it, he had to be, but damned if JARVIS didn’t seem ready to apologize anyway.

“You did, sir. Master Loki overwrote the command.”

“What? Why am I just now hearing about this?”

“Master Loki is very thorough in his attentions.”

Tony squinted and drew the back of his arm across his forehead to wipe away the sweat on his brow. “That’s extraordinarily creepy. Remind me to add assault charges to his file. Wait, he really told you to call him _Master_ Loki? Yeah, no. From now on, he’s to be known as that asshole with the horns.”

“A bit lengthy, don’t you think, sir?”

“Fine. Shorten it to horny asshole.” There was a pause, and Tony just knew JARVIS was snickering. Somehow. “Forget it. Just call him – you know what, he’s Satan. Call him Satan.”

“Forgive me, sir, but that name is currently in use. Incidentally, I would recommend updating Director Fury’s records before he learns of this.”

Tony scratched at his goatee and nodded to himself. “Yeah, good call. Okay, just refer to Loki as Loki for now. None of this ‘master’ crap.”

“It lacks your usual flair, but very well.”

Tony stood and rolled his shoulders to ease the stiffness in his back. There was something wrong with the fact he had to consult his self-built AI for relationship advice – not that he would have discussed this kind of thing with a real person even if he was involved with someone _not_ on every international terrorist threat list.

“You really think I miss him?”

“I do, sir, yes.”

Not what Tony wanted to hear, and he expressed as much by cringing up at the nearest speaker as though he could personally offend JARVIS.

“In my observations,” JARVIS continued, either oblivious or spiteful or perhaps, after all this time, finally enacting the HAL 9000 protocols he’d constructed in secret, “you tend to express loss through obtaining a new hobby to distract yourself.”

Tony’s hand tightened around the wrench he’d just picked out of the rolling toolkit near the car. “When did you get your Psy-D again? I must have missed that.”

“You programmed me with your own analytical abilities, sir.”

“And apparently my unexplored ability to give passive-aggressive answers.” He turned the wrench over in his hands to keep them busy. “Go on, doctor. But you bring my parents into this and I swear to God I’m making DUM-E my new therapist. Fair warning.”

“Understood. When Colonel Rhodes was away on assignment in July and failed to return your calls, you bought an auction house’s entire collection of vintage Transformers toys and mechanically altered them.”

“I was feeling nostalgic. And I was worried.”

“After he sent you a message that he was well and simply busy, you staged a scene in which you were surrounded by animatronic toys and sent Colonel Rhodes a picture with the email heading ‘Help, the machines have risen.’”

Tony grinned to himself at the memory. Rhodey had shot back an email after that welcoming his new robotic overlords and asking if he could have Tony’s Jaguar after Optimus Prime led the rebellion and harvested his body for the collective. He always knew there was a reason he and Rhodey were friends.

“Okay, one example. That hardly constitutes a pattern.”

“During Miss Potts’ sabbatical in September, you initiated a move to acquire Hasbro.”

“For a very good reason,” Tony countered, waving the wrench at the nearest monitor. “Did you see that last action figure line they came out with for the team? Steve looked more like a raging beast than the Hulk did. It was a matter of protecting the IP’s image.”

“Miss Potts was surprised and somewhat alarmed that you even knew how to manage to begin a merger.”

“Hey, I ran this company for a long time before she took over.” JARVIS was condemningly silent. “Okay, kind of. Point is, I’m not helpless.”

“You bought a yacht in sorry need of repairs when—”

“All right, fine. I get it.” Tony made a mental note to scrap the yacht project, given it was still docked in New Jersey and city workers kept leaving increasingly adamant messages for him about public concerns over what they may as well have called a rusty eyesore.

He glanced at the disassembled engine scattered in pieces around the car. So maybe it wasn’t just a coincidence that he’d bought the junker after going longer than three weeks without hearing or seeing any hint of Loki.

With a sigh, he dropped the wrench back into the toolbox.

“So what do you think I should do?”

“By all accounts, sir, Loki is unpredictable and even more prone to distraction that you are.”

“Easy there. DUM-E’s just biding his time waiting to take over your spot at the top of the pecking order.”

“No offense meant, of course, sir. But perhaps the proper course of action would be to entice Loki to visit more often or for longer periods.”

Tony’s nose scrunched. “You say that like my sweet ass isn’t enough incentive to get him to drop in now and then.”

“I would never suggest such a thing, sir.”

Toeing at a discarded gasket, Tony pushed his hands into his pockets.

“So what are you saying? I should drug him next time he shows up? Pull a soap opera plot and tell him I’m pregnant in order to trap him? ‘Cause I don’t think that’s gonna work.”

“You could try something less drastic. Dinner, perhaps.”

“Dinner.” Tony recoiled. “What, like a date? Are you actively encouraging me to date S.H.I.E.L.D.’s most wanted criminal? Talk about a conflict of interest.”

“Sleeping with that criminal might be a bigger cause for concern, sir.”

Tony glared at a projector. It accomplished nothing, but at least it made him feel a little better.

“Remind me to program you with some tact in the next patch.”

“Colonel Rhodes did warn you of the dangers inherent in using your own personality as my intelligence base.”

“Did you . . . did you just subtly insult me? JARVIS. I feel like I’m sending my little boy off to his first day of school. I’m so proud.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Dinner. Wining and dining, sure. Tony could do that. He was _good_ at that. But _dating_? That hadn’t happened since he was a teenager and when he was still naïve enough to think any kind of halfway normal relationship could ever work out for him.

. . . what did a time-displaced space Viking even eat?

 

*** 

 

There were a lot of ways Tony envisioned himself dying, ranging from the mundane (heart attack) to the pathetic (alcohol poisoning) to the outrageous (smothered at the bottom of a Victoria’s Secret model orgy). He prided himself on his fanciful imagination, but “stabbed in the jugular by a humorless alien wielding a steak knife” had never crossed his mind. Not even once. 

It should have.

“Are you vegetarian? Vegan? Because you gotta tell me these things.”

Loki said nothing, just stood next to the table staring down at the selection of food spread out atop it with an expression Tony could only describe as “murderous confusion.” Loki had materialized from nothing when Tony called (literally, he’d yelled at the ceiling in hopes Loki would make good on his frequent threat to watch every movement Tony made) with a flourish of green light and a mysterious wind that ripped his hair and coattails into the air in a very dramatic, romance novel cover kind of way. It was fitting. Unfortunately, his usually meticulously neat appearance was absent, replaced with mud-caked clothing and armor streaked with dried blood. The pungent smell of death clung to him, and coupled with his appearance, Tony got the simultaneously hilarious and disturbing mental image of Loki happily rolling around on the bodies of his enemies like a dog on roadkill. Loki’s face kept him from voicing exactly that.

“Uh, Loki? Could you maybe not look like you’re on the verge of gutting me?” His eyes lowered to the steak knife Loki had grabbed from the table immediately and still clutched in a white-knuckled grip. “Or at least put that down?”

Slowly, Loki looked down at the knife in his hand, seemingly surprised to find it there. When he looked up at Tony, his already thin lips were pinched almost into a state of nonexistence, his face even paler than normal but for the beginnings of a light flush spreading over his cheeks.

“You are unharmed.”

Talking. That was a start. Tony nodded and carefully put down the bottle of pinot noir he’d been holding when Loki arrived. No sudden movements.

“I’m fine. You . . .” Look like shit and smell worse, but Tony valued his life too much to finish that sentence.

“You are not under attack?”

“ . . .no?” Brow furrowing, Tony reached up to scratch the back of his head. “I know there’s a big culture difference here, but I didn’t think a dinner invitation amounted to a declaration of war with you people.”

“Dinner.”

Loki said it with almost exactly the same combination of disbelief and disdain as Tony had when JARVIS first suggested it. Tony nodded mutely, instinctively taking half a step backward as Loki’s mouth twisted up into a sneer.

“You summoned me to break bread with you?”

“Don’t be so formal about it. I thought . . .” Tony trailed off, weakly waving a hand at the table. “I was thinking a nice dinner at home, a movie, screwing until we physically can’t anymore.” The knife turned around Loki’s fingers as though he was testing its weight and calculating how hard he would need to throw it to embed it firmly in Tony’s skull.

“Uh, or we can skip the movie. Or dinner. Or both! I’m flexible. I mean –”

“Do you have any idea how rare it is to not only find a wyrm in its lair at all, much less one occupied by a hibernating beast? Do you have _any_ idea how powerful a spell component even a single dragon scale is and how many sorcerers would give their very souls for an entire hide?”

“I . . . no. No, I do not.” Loki’s eyes narrowed. “Am I supposed to? Is that a thing I’m supposed to know? Because in my defense, sometimes you go on these magic-related tangents and I kind of don’t catch everything.”

“And who are you to summon me? A _mortal_.”

Tony rolled his eyes, temporarily forgetting how easily Loki was riled when he was in one of his moods.

“Pretty sure ‘summoning’ involves, like, the blood of virgins and farm animals and shit. As you can see, I’m fresh out of both, along with fucks to give about your superiority complex and your ‘pitiful mortals’ act.”

“I grant you far too much leniency.”

Tony shrugged, and Loki finally (thankfully) put the knife down. Moods every bit as mercurial as a cat’s, Loki smiled slightly and tilted his head up toward Tony, aiming for coy and landing at sly and vaguely creepy-arousing. Tony got used to that weird combination (and the even weirder way it totally worked for him) a long time ago.

“Are you attempting to court me, Tony Stark?”

“Attempting? That implies the possibility of failure. And I gotta tell you, I am going to charm your figurative _and_ literal pants off.”

“Are you?” Loki laughed. Laughing was good, too. Better than talking. Unless he was laughing because he didn’t think Tony could follow through, in which case, challenge accepted.

Loki trailed long, thin fingers along the edge of the table, playing at casual indifference in a way that might have been convincing if not for the way he was very clearly taking stock of the offerings before him. He seemed particularly taken with the bowl of freshly sliced melon. He stopped completely when he noticed a bowl of melted chocolate next to another bowl of whole strawberries (trite, okay, but it was a staple in every seduction for a reason). Tony was glad to see that his hunch about Loki having a sweet tooth panned out.

“And you mean to accomplish this with food?”

“No. I’m relying on my irresistible wit, dashing good looks, and the knowledge that I haven’t sucked your dick in a while and we both know you miss it.”

“So presumptuous,” Loki chided, but the yearning glance he slanted at Tony – at Tony’s mouth, specifically – said he was far more intrigued than offended. For that matter, so did his abandonment of the table so that he could step closer to Tony. Hit with a sudden overwhelming stench, Tony moved back automatically, nose wrinkled, and Loki stopped in his tracks.

“Ah. Well, you did pick a most unfortunate time to call for me. You should have told me of your plans.”

“I didn’t actually plan it. Pretty spur of the moment.”

Somehow, he managed to keep a stellar poker face when lying to the _god of lies._ Tony often acted on impulse, but this? No. Rather shamefully, he’d spent the past four days embracing his previously unexplored inner housewife personality by scouring Pinterest for recipes, tablescapes, and even, God help him, mood music. It’d been a while since he’d actually had to _try_ to win anyone over, okay? Anyway, he decided on traditional northern European recipes because that seemed logical and he wasn’t about to ask Thor how to seduce his little brother via the culinary arts. He also wasn’t about to cook it himself – that was way too rom-com for his sanity – but it helped to have suggestions to offer to the team’s private chef, who seemed thrilled to make something besides lasagna and sandwiches. By working his own human variant of magic, Chef Gonzales created within just a few hours a feast spread out across the smaller table in the private dining room that rarely saw use as anything but temporary storage.

Looking at the broad array of food on platters, in bowls, and one large stew pot in the center of the table, Tony reconsidered the wisdom of giving the chef free rein over the menu. It was going to be difficult to explain such peculiar leftovers whenever anyone looked in the fridge the next day.

With any luck, he and Loki would end up feeding each other chocolate-covered strawberries so he’d only have to account for why he felt like exploring the food of Thor’s pseudo-people.

Loki eyed him as though he could tell Tony was lying; maybe he could, lying being his specialty and all. If he suspected dishonesty, though, he kept any accusations to himself, no doubt saving them for retaliation the next time Tony called him out for the same.

“This is elaborate for a simple dinner for two,” he pointed out with a gesture toward a platter overflowing with smoked salmon.

“Go big or go home, baby.”

“I see.”

The air shimmered pale green for less than a second. When it cleared, Loki sat at the table in – God, Tony was _so_ getting laid – an immaculate suit consisting of a crisp white shirt, black slacks and jacket, and a thin, dark green tie hanging delicately from the precise center of Loki’s throat. His hair no longer bore resemblance to the tangled nest of black curls he’d been sporting upon arrival, but was now clean and straight and hanging so that it just brushed his shoulders. Huh. So he’d gotten it cut recently. Interesting. But mostly, Tony was just thankful the odor from before was gone, replaced by the faint scent of pine and leather.

“Damn. That is still just the coolest trick ever.” Tony walked around the table, fingers grazing the back of Loki’s neck as he moved. The scent stirred again and he smiled as he took his seat. “Mmm. New Loki smell. I like it. Very rustic.”

Loki said nothing, but his mouth twitched at the corners indicated well enough that he was pleased and fighting against revealing as much.

“Did you do all this yourself?”

Tony didn’t have the ego to even pretend to be sheepish. “Hell no. We’d be having cereal and booze if that were the case. This is all my chef’s handiwork, so you can thank him in the form of not killing him next time you bring your petty Avengers-taunting-party by the tower.”

The smile finally broke free despite Loki’s attempts to smother it. Another good sign.

Tony reached for the wine and pulled the cork free in order to pour a glass for Loki and then for himself.

“I cut up the melon, though. And I think I handed him a potato at some point before he told me to get lost.”

Loki nodded, clearly amused, and Tony accepted that as confirmation that murder was no longer on the agenda for the evening.

“I’m sure your contribution was valuable.” Loki paused to survey the spread, eventually opting for the smoked sausage. “It does look delicious. Thank you.”

That shouldn’t have made Tony feel as stupidly happy as it did.

“Never let it be said I take you for granted. I know how to keep my man.” Complete with a cheeky grin, though it dimmed a little at the sharp look he was given.

“You think highly of yourself—”

“Duh.”

“—to think you can keep me.”

“I aim high.”

Loki hummed in his characteristically non-answering fashion.

“So why’d you show up like you did?”

“Why did you call for me as you did?”

Tony frowned and watched his knife and fork hover in midair over a plate of roast lamb all but hidden under a thick layer of some kind of sauce he couldn’t begin to identify.

“I just asked you to come by.”

This time it was Loki’s turn to look up. He swallowed a mouthful of greens, washed it down with a swig of wine, and primly dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a fine linen napkin. None of that cheap paper crap, not tonight.

“You said, and I quote, ‘Loki, if you can hear me, I really need you to come here as soon as you can.’”

Tony’s eyebrows lifted into his hairline in response to Loki’s flawless imitation of Tony’s voice; whether it was magic or a natural talent for impressions, it was frighteningly accurate.

“So you dropped everything to come rescue me? Aww.”

“Yes, well, as you said: you do have certain talents I find desirable.”

Tony dropped his chin into his hand and fluttered his eyelashes outrageously.

“Ooh. Tell me more. Don’t be shy.”

Loki smiled, all sharp white teeth in a sea of creamy pale skin.

“You suck cock like a thirsty whore and you are consistently as tight as an untouched virgin. I find both those qualities, among others, valuable.”

Tony didn’t blush easily (or ever, really) and he didn’t then, but he did muffle a noise of surprise around a dinner roll.

Loki’s smile broadened.

“You were correct before. I _have_ missed that.”

As far as dinners with wanted intergalactic criminals went, Tony thought he was doing pretty well. Of course, success in that situation consisted mostly of surviving, but the conversation, though sparse, was pleasant, a generous blend of intelligent banter and flirty come-ons.

Halfway through the movie and an entire bottle of wine between them, Tony lost interest in following the plot on the screen. Watching Loki’s tongue make little kitten laps at the chocolate on his fingertips was much more worthwhile.

By the time the movie’s villain was revealed and his intricate plot began to unravel, Tony was perched in Loki’s lap with his knees bracketing the god’s hips and his hands tangled in that long (shorter!) black hair. He was also hard. Really, _desperately_ hard, and Loki could tell as much through the thin fabric of their dress pants. Tony rocked endlessly against Loki, burying his breathless moans in the side of Loki’s neck. Loki, meanwhile, amused himself with sucking a great red bruise to Tony’s shoulder and sliding his hands up under Tony’s shirt to splay out across his back.”

“Sir—”

“Not now,” Tony growled, earning a hum of approval from Loki.

“Apologies for the interruption, sir, but Director Fury is on the line and requesting your immediate attention.”

Tony groaned and wound his fingers tighter into Loki’s hair in a stubborn display of spite.

“Director Fury can get bent. _I’m_ about to get bent and he is _not_ going to cock-block me from the other side of the planet or wherever he is.”

A low and throaty chuckle reverberated against Tony’s shoulder, followed by an appreciative squeeze as Loki’s hands dropped into the seat of Tony’s pants.

“He says he is in New York and the team requires your presence to contain a possible widespread threat.”

Tony froze, previously heightened libido dropping through the floor. Loki’s hands went still.

“Sir, Director Fury also wishes to inform you that Thor cannot be reached and the nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. jets are en route but still twenty minutes out.”

“They need aerial support.”

“Yes, sir.”

No one in the entire history of human existence had ever sighed a deeper sigh than Tony did in that instant.

“Loki . . .”

“Go,” Loki said, pulling his hands back out of Tony’s pants, and Tony mentally cursed Fury for being directly responsible for the sudden loss of that comforting chill on his overheated skin.

“I’ll make it up to you.”

Loki nodded like he wasn’t really listening, his dismissive expression hinting that he’d already given up trying to convince Tony to stay. Mouth setting in determination, Tony leaned back and cupped his hands against Loki’s face.

“No, I mean it. I’ll try not to sound the alarm next time, though.”

“I do not exist to answer your every cry.”

“Well, maybe if you’d stop in more often. Leave a forwarding address, you know, that kind of thing.”

“We’ll see.”

Tony unexpectedly dropped down on the couch as Loki just as unexpectedly vanished.

“Asshole,” he muttered (fondly, but still). Getting to his feet, he looked mournfully down at the bowl of discarded strawberry tops on the table.

“Fuck. Okay, tell ‘em I’m on my way. Five—” He took a step forward and winced at the uncomfortable pull of cloth against his groin. “Seven. Seven minutes.”

 

***

 

At just past three a.m., Tony limped his way into his bedroom. With Loki not being up to his usual level of public insanity and von Doom busy dealing with some kind of peasant revolt or what-the-fuck-ever in Latveria, other, much less competent jackoffs had stepped up to try to take the crown of Grand Villain Supreme. Most of them could be put down solely through the power of open mockery. Some of them were annoyingly persistent and had way too much power to handle when they had the same approximate maturity and vocabulary of the average thirteen-year-old Call of Duty player. 

Tonight had been one of the latter occasions. Some escapee from Xavier’s School for Applied Darwinism upstate decided to take out his teenage angst on Times Square (and why, Tony wondered, why did it _always_ have to be New York? Why not decide to ravage the Pennsylvania farmland where any ensuing casualties could conveniently double as steaks for the post-battle feast?). Super strength, near invulnerability, flight, and teenage hormones were a dangerous combination. On the good side, Tony discovered that his new suit could withstand a direct, point-blank hit from a Fed-Ex truck.

On the bad side, Tony had taken a direct, point-blank hit from a Fed-Ex truck.

Xavier’s band of merry men finally showed up late to the party as always to collect their runaway hooligan (seriously, the school was all of forty minutes away from New York City; why did it _always_ take them so long to clean up their own brats’ messes?). Whatever. They showed up, and Tony was left free to drag himself home to mourn the bruises he was going to be sporting soon.

He trudged into his bedroom, a hundred and some-odd pounds of battered death weight, forced himself into the en suite for a brief shower, then dropped face-first onto his bed with all the grace of a sloth.

“Jay. Anyone tries to wake me up at any point during the next thirty-six hours, activate the missile defense system.”

“I am unaware of any such system, sir.”

“Then make one. Rig a squirt gun to the door. I don’t care. Just make them go away.”

“Might I suggest a ‘do not disturb’ sign? A sock on the door, maybe?”

Tony squinted. “Either I’m getting too mellow for my own good or you’re getting even more deviant.”

He yawned and nestled down into the pillow, settling in for what he hoped would be at least half a day’s worth of uninterrupted sleep, but his gaze fell on the nightstand where he noticed a folded slip of paper tucked between the lamp and a book Tony didn’t remember putting there. With a grunt, he shoved himself up onto his elbow and flipped the book over to read the spine. Something in French, and yeah, that wasn’t his. He snorted and rolled his eyes. Pretentious asshole. There were probably fancy cigarette ashes in the bed and everything.

He pulled the note free and opened it, scanning quickly in case it was a breakup note or a curse. Or, knowing Loki, both.

_Tony Stark,_

_Per your request, I have acquired a telephone so that you may contact me in a manner less obnoxious than this evening._

_I hope your heroics went well, or, at the very least, you manage to survive._

_Yours,  
_ _L_

_P.S. . . You need a new telephone._

Blinking, Tony suddenly realized he’d left his cell – a very elaborate, custom Stark Phone – on the bedside table, precisely where Loki left his douchebag calling card. 

“You sticky-fingered little bastard,” he muttered aloud, unable to stop the grin pulling at his mouth as he rummaged through the top drawer to get another phone. This one was a new prototype he’d spent the past couple weeks playing with; it hadn’t gone to development yet and it didn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it was at least functional.

Loki answered on the third ring.

“You couldn’t have just asked me for a phone?”

Loki laughed softly by way of reply, and Tony’s interest was already piqued with how noticeably out of breath Loki sounded.

“I thought I’d save you the trouble. I’m glad to see you survived your latest crisis.”

“I got hit by a truck.”

“How dreadful. Still, survival is always commendable.”

“I’m sorry, did you not hear the part where I got hit by a goddamn _truck_? I know that’s nothing to you Asgardian freaks ‘cause you guys can juggle them, but that’s a lot of damn weight for a human.”

“You’re breathing and making jokes, Stark. You’ll live.”

“Your bedside manner sucks.”

Loki hummed quietly on the other end of the line, apparently in agreement and unwilling to contest the point, so Tony consoled himself with that tiny victory.

“The camera on this device is exceptional.”

“I don’t know whether to be more surprised that you can operate a camera or that you even know what one is.”

“You flatter yourself with the imagined complexity of your _technology._ ”

“It’s not a dirty word, you know.”

The phone in Tony’s hand vibrated and emitted a short, shrill chirp. When he flipped it over, he saw a new message waiting for him, sent from his own number. He knew better than to open it, he _did_ , but that didn’t stop him from opening it anyway and getting an eyeful of Loki’s lower body – and it said something unfortunate about their level of familiarity with each other that Tony could identify Loki’s lower half at a skewed angle of a phone being held awkwardly overhead. And when that lower half was naked. And . . . oh.

“I see your evening went a lot better than mine,” Tony said, totally _not_ zooming in on the photo to get a closer look at Loki’s spent cock resting against his stomach, pointing incriminatingly at the small pool of come higher up Loki’s stomach and chest.

“Much.”

“How come you can figure out how to send me nude selfies – which is great blackmail material, thanks – and yet Thor still can’t understand what the different settings on the washing machine are for?”

“Contrary to appearances, Thor is not stupid. It isn’t that he _can’t_ learn; he simply chooses not to do so. He is still very much a spoiled prince at heart.”

There was a grain of truth in that, as there was in much of what Loki said, but it was so steeped in jaded bullshit that Tony wasn’t even going to try to argue.

“Well. Uh, thank you for this lovely goodnight present. I’ll cherish it always and promise to not post it on Instagram when you break up with me so that all my friends can Photoshop your dick to a smaller size.”

“I would like to try again.”

Tony covered his mouth so that Loki wouldn’t hear his yawn. “You got the godly stamina, pal, not me. You know, seeing as how I was hit by a _truck_ recently.”

“I meant our evening. It was . . . enjoyable before it was interrupted.”

“Why do you always sound like an android when you try to express emotion? I mean, it’s kinda cute, but kind of Hannibal Lector-levels of socially awkward, you know?”

“The trick, I believe,” Loki continued, evidently not even bothering to listen to Tony anymore, “is to remove ourselves from an environment where we _can_ be interrupted.”

Tony finally tore his eyes from the photo on his screen and put the phone back up to his ear.

“You mean like a real date.”

“Precisely.”

“Yeah, okay. That has zero potential for disaster whatsoever. Let’s do it. I’m free Wednesday night. You in?”

“Yes.”

“You, uh, you know you can’t show up looking like yourself, right?”

“I’m aware. How would you like me to appear?”

Tony thought for all of half a second. “Don’t care. Surprise me. Just for the love of God, not someone I know. I don’t care how good you are, I am _not_ fucking a visual clone of my dad.”

“You wound me to think I would do such a thing.”

“You were already thinking it, weren’t you?”

Loki was suspiciously quiet.

“You sick son of a bitch. Listen, it’s been fun, but I’m about to pass out here. I’ll text you the time and place sometime tomorrow. Sound good?”

“Agreed. Goodnight, Tony Stark. Sleep well.”

The phone disconnected before Tony could reply, but just as he was about to drop it back onto the nightstand it chirped again. Another new message. A picture message, in fact, and Tony bit his lip, thumb hovering over the screen.

When he was feeling like he’d literally been hit by a truck in the morning, _then_ he’d check out the new depravity Loki had sent him. It might make him feel more inclined to pick a real restaurant instead of shooting Loki a text telling him to come meet him at In-and-Out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki looked like the embodiment of every last damn one of those songs about female predators eating their mates, and Tony hadn’t been so turned on in a very long time.

Wednesday night found Tony seated at a table in a “private” section of some fancy restaurant with a name he couldn’t pronounce and a menu that took the “if you have to ask how much it is, you don’t belong here” approach to guest friendliness. It was “private” only in the sense that preferred clientele got to sit in a less crowded section off-limits to anyone with so much as a camera phone (so there went any more adventurous ideas Loki might have had). It seemed like just the sort of place Loki would enjoy: high class, pretentious as fuck, and since Loki courted trouble, exactly the kind of place that Tony wouldn’t mind seeing razed to the ground if something went wrong like a villain attack or a cook not preparing Loki’s food exactly as ordered.

Tony sternly refused to make eye contact with a nearby waiter who kept looking in his direction with that same apologetic expression every restaurant employee got when a guest had clearly been stood up. He hadn’t been stood up. He _hadn’t_. Loki was just a diva and liked making an entrance; Tony understood that. Loki also liked the indirect ego boost of knowing Tony would sacrifice his time just to wait around on him; Tony understood _that_ , too.

He was finishing his second whiskey when he heard a faint murmur go through the crowd in the riffraff section. Probably some reality TV starlet making her way toward the back of the restaurant, he thought. The silhouette, from what little he could see, was definitely female. And stupidly tall, which meant she shared Pepper’s fondness for sky-high heels. Oh, God, what if it _was_ Pepper? He frantically checked his smuggled in phone for any signs that she was looking for him, but nothing.

And then Moses appeared to part the sea of gawkers. Moses had a really nice rack.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he muttered, awed both by the sheer gall and, well, sometimes he was a simple creature and just got overwhelmed by attractive people. And he was _always_ overwhelmed with how pretty Loki was, even if he’d never seen him – her – quite like this.

That was most certainly Loki, though in a decidedly feminine body draped in a long black gown with gold accents at the waist, gold jewelry, and dangling green earrings that reminded Tony of dripping snake venom for some reason. Probably appropriate, given the source; maybe even _literal_ , given the source.

His (her?) hair was swept up into a tastefully messy updo, tendrils of long, wavy black hair escaping to frame her face in a way that was too perfect to have been accidental. Her makeup was a little extreme, but Tony would expect nothing less than deep crimson lips and deep gray eye shadow that made her eyes look much darker than they actually were.

She looked like the embodiment of every last damn one of those songs about female predators eating their mates, and Tony hadn’t been so turned on in a very long time.

“Mister Stark,” the maître d' said as he approached the table and pulled out the chair opposite him. “Madam,” he continued with a polite nod at Loki, who nodded and smiled in return.

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure. If there’s anything else I can help you with, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll let your server know right away that you’ve arrived.”

Loki nodded again in acknowledgment, then turned, seemingly pleased to see that Tony had stood on ceremony.

“I . . . was not expecting this, I’ll give you that,” he said by way of greeting after several long moments of just staring. Loki licked her lips and Tony swallowed. Hard. “God. You . . .” He trailed off, waving a hand at her before finally walking around the table to take her hand and leaning in to kiss her cheek. She returned the gesture, but then just as abruptly removed one hand from his to place it against the side of his face, holding him in an iron grip as she brought their mouths together. As far as their usual kisses went, it was still chaste by comparison, but the flustered clearing of throats around them said otherwise by normal standards.

“What is that phrase? You clean up nicely, Tony. You should dress like that more often,” Loki murmured, swiping her thumb across Tony’s mouth to clear away the lipstick remnants she’d left behind.

“Uh. Yeah. Back at you.”

She smiled demurely (yeah, right) and sat down in her seat, so Tony followed suit.

“Seriously. You look amazing.”

“I know.”

“And you’re so modest about it.”

Loki glanced up as she unfolded a napkin to place over her lap. “Would you be interested otherwise?”

“I like a . . . partner who knows their worth.” He frowned slightly, studying Loki over as much as he could without also indulging in the intense desire to feel every inch of her to find the flaw in the illusion. And for other reasons, but for _science_ , dammit. “What should I call you, anyway?”

“Lori.”

Tony laughed quietly. “Smooth.”

“That would work as well, if you must.”

That earned a bigger laugh. “Okay, scale of one to ten: how much did that get you off just now, seeing people basically jizz in their pants when you walked by?”

“I see you can clean up your appearance, if not your vocabulary.”

“Would you be interested otherwise?”

Loki took a sip of her water and grinned. “Well played. And don’t worry, Stark. Whether or not it ‘got me off,’ as you say, women have no limits to how often they can repeat. Rest assured that I will still enjoy letting you drink from the same cup, as it were.”

“That is both the weirdest and hottest come-on anyone has ever made to me. Bravo.”

Loki tipped her glass slightly in a mock salute.

“Seriously, though. How . . .? I mean, it’s not an illusion. I couldn’t have kissed you if it was. But—” He snapped his mouth shut at the warning glare Loki shot him.

“Perhaps this could be discussed at a better time, hmm?”

Right. Sometimes it was frighteningly easy to forget he was dating someone whose very existence was impossible by modern human physics and that Loki was still enormously unpopular with the general population.

The server arrived to annoy them with the usual list of house specialties and overpriced swill, but Tony was polite and let him finish.

“I’ll have the black angus prime ribeye, medium-well, and the lobster salad.”

“And for your drink?”

“Oh. Uh . . .” Tony _really_ didn’t want to have to hear the run-down of the entire wine list again.

Loki, without even looking up from her menu, butted in. “We’ll have the Pacalet Philippe 2006.”

Tony vaguely recalled that being one of the more expensive offerings. Awesome. Fine, whatever. He didn’t care (it was the _principle_ , damn it all).

“A fine choice. And what can I get for you this evening, ma’am?”

Tony held his breath.

“To start, I’ll take the shrimp and scallops appetizer. I’ll also have the duck breast, the white truffle pasta, and the pan-seared quail with sautéed mushrooms. I notice the menu didn’t say how those mushrooms were prepared, but I want them sautéed. The hazelnuts should also be very lightly roasted to avoid an overly nutty flavor.”

The server did a good job at hiding his surprise with the sheer volume of food Loki ordered, but Tony could see his eyebrows getting progressively higher with each item added to the list.

“All excellent dishes. I’ll make sure the chef pays close attention to your order. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll go get your drinks.”

Loki dismissed the server with the tight-lipped smile of a royal getting rid of a servant.

“You’re something else. Where are you planning on putting all that food, anyway?”

“I plan on eating it,” Loki answered immediately, giving Tony the same disappointed look one might give an overly dense child.

“All of it?”

“It would be a shame to waste it.”

Tony heaved a dramatic sigh and propped his chin in his hand just as he had a few nights earlier during their first dinner.

“A woman with expensive tastes who can put away food like a champ. I think I’m in love.”

Just as before, dinner went well. The food arrived (and kept arriving, in Loki’s case) and conversation kept up between ever-changing dishes and wine strong enough to make them a little more openly flirtatious than they might otherwise be. Well, Loki, anyway. Tony had no shame.

Just when the game of footsies going on under the table promised to get interesting, a loud clamor emerged near the restaurant’s entrance. Another celebrity? That would be too hopeful, and Tony’s hopes for such bottomed out when Loki picked her head up and scowled.

“There is a sorcerer nearby. A powerful one.”

“Of course there is.”

Loki hesitated, then sighed. “A familiar one, unfortunately.”

“ _Of course_. I don’t suppose it’s a friend of yours?”

“Either way I answer that is unlikely to comfort you,” Loki pointed out, and Tony had to agree. Loki’s “friends” tended to be “allies I haven’t screwed over just yet” and inevitably turned out to be just as bad as he was. Or she. Tony was starting to feel a headache bloom in the back of his skull.

“Ma’am – ma’am, please, if I could just get the name of your reservation—”

“Amora, you witless little troll. But I have no need of reservations. My guest is already expecting me, if he has two brain cells to rub together yet.”

Tony watched in morbid fascination as a tall, gorgeous blonde strode toward their table with all the confidence of someone who owned the world around her. Another Asgardian, then, and really, Tony was about done with all of them. Behind her loomed a hulking monster of a bodyguard, easily Thor’s size or larger, with a stern expression and something sheathed and strapped on his back. Probably a sword, Tony figured, because damn space Vikings and their weird-ass rules of what did and did not belong in polite society.

The intruders stopped at the side of the table. Amora eyed Loki and sneered like every high school mean girl Tony had ever seen in a movie, but she didn’t even glance at him. Her accompanying thug, however, kept diverting his attention from his charge to Tony, which wasn’t all that comforting.

“Why, Loki. You’ve certainly changed since the last time we saw each other.”

The woman’s voice was pleasant, Tony noticed against his will, almost sing-song like without being overt or annoying. And seriously, fuck Asgard and everyone who called it home.

“Hello, Amora. Do you like the look? I modeled it after Lorelei. I hope you don’t mind.”

The blonde’s jaw tightened just enough for Tony to notice and he kicked Loki under the table in the silent, universal gesture of “don’t antagonize the crazy aliens with crazy alien weapons.”

“I’m sure she’d be flattered. But I think you know I didn’t come all this way to discuss my sister with you.”

Oh. _Oh._ Loki was playing the sister card? Sneaky. Kind of stupid, also, but ballsy, and Tony admired that.

“Did you come for dinner? I honestly can’t recommend the duck; it was a bit oily. The quail, on the other hand, is simply fantastic.”

“Don’t play with me, Loki,” Amora warned, energy sparking at her fingertips. Tony sat up a bit straighter in his chair, earning the meathead’s full attention.

“Ladies, I don’t mean to interrupt, but maybe you could take this somewhere else?”

Amora finally turned and looked at Tony for the first time, blinked, and then gave him the most disarmingly beautiful smile he’d seen in . . . possibly ever, actually, and right, there was probably a reason why she was called _Amora._

“Oh, how rude of me not to notice you. You must be Loki’s pet mortal that I’ve heard so much about. One of the – what do you call yourselves? The Avengers? You’re one of them, no?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “How pathetic. You can’t defeat them so you choose to play nice with them by seducing one of their own. I thought you were above that, Liesmith.”

Loki shrugged and took a casual sip of her wine. “I followed your lead, dear Enchantress. Parting your legs seemed to get you so far, I thought perhaps it might work for me as well.”

Amora shot a look over her shoulder at the thug when he stirred behind her. “Hold.” She flipped back around so quickly her hair took a second to catch up. “This has been such a pleasant conversation and I hate to cut it short, but I really must be going soon.”

Loki had the audacity to wave with her free hand.

“But not without the wyrm scales I was promised.”

Tony suddenly had an even worse feeling about this.

“I haven’t got them.”

“Then where are they?” Amora asked through clenched teeth.

“Still on the wyrm, I would presume.”

Fists curling tightly at her sides, Amora’s face became decidedly less charming and more like what a time bomb might look like with a little makeup.

“I held up my end of the bargain, you lying wretch. I provided the distraction you needed. I _saw_ you enter the lair. You think you can hoard the entire cache for yourself, don’t you?” 

The maître d' took a brazen step forward, shrinking slightly under the multiple pairs of eyes suddenly trained on him.

“Miss, I really am going to have to ask you to please leave or else I’ll be forced to call the police.”

“Oh, please do,” Amora snarled, which her bodyguard took as his cue to whip out the – holy shit, it was an _axe_ the size of a small tree – weapon on his back. The maître d' gasped and held out his hands, quickly backtracking into another table and barely catching himself before tumbling over.

The rest of the building’s patrons decided that was a good time to flee.

“You’ve made a mess of my evening,” Loki said with the perfect air of regal disapproval. “We might have settled this like reasonable peers at another time.”

“Show yourself, Liesmith,” Amora shot back, an eerie green aura taking effect all around her. “I would at least show you the respect of having your corpse wear your own face and armor, instead of that cheap garbage you wear now.”

“Oooh,” Tony half-whistled, and yeah, he’d probably had too much wine for this.

Loki finished her wine and stood, her form changing as she moved as curves gave way to sharp angles and the rigid lines of golden armor and too many buckles to count.

“Another time, perhaps, Stark.”

With a wave of his hand, Loki vanished, taking with him his two unhappy visitors – and the half-finished platter of shrimp.

 

***

 

Four hours later, Tony received another picture message from his old phone number. 

Loki sat atop the axe-happy goon, who was face-down on the ground. A green boot was barely visible at the far right of the photo. And Loki, bless his sadistic little heart, was grinning and holding a chunk of blond hair up within view of the camera. Aside from a few cuts on his face and an ugly gash on the side of his neck, he appeared no worse for wear.

Tony shut the phone off, stared at Bruce’s tablet he’d been in the process of repairing when the phone alerted him to a new message, and surrendered to the fit of laughter making him splutter uncontrollably.

Loki was actually insane. And Tony _liked_ that.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third attempt at a date was Loki’s first and final solo effort.
> 
> It didn't work.

The third attempt at a date was Loki’s first and final solo effort.

Loki had at some point in the past week decided that bringing all of New York’s statuary to life was a brilliant plan. It worked, in that it got the Avengers out into the open (and more than one member of the team was chastised for riding one of those statues, and for once, Tony wasn’t in on that).

It didn’t work, in that the “date” never got very far.

After losing sight of the team and then losing communication as well, Tony began to worry. Loki’s voice intercepting JARVIS’s in the suit’s HUD only made him worry that much more.

“Good afternoon, Stark. I trust all is well?”

“Peachy. You know, just another Monday. Punched a bronze Shakespeare zombie-walking his way out of Central Park. Thanks for that, I guess.”

“You’re welcome,” Loki answered, either oblivious to or not caring that Tony wasn’t actually thanking him.

“Hey, while you’re here, mind telling me where the hell my team is?”

“Why should I?”

“Because I’ll be less inclined to kick your ass when I find you?”

“Oh, Stark,” Loki chuckled, “you are so precious when you’re angry. As it turns out, though, I do know where you can find your teammates.”

Tony waited. Stared at the HUD display, fully expecting a troll face to appear.

“And?”

“They’re safe.”

“Yeah, that’s slightly less than reassuring coming from you, for multiple reasons. Gonna have to do better than that.”

The boot repulsors gradually cut out as Tony touched down, newly re-bronzed (petrified wasn’t the right word, but it was all that was coming to mind) Shakespeare held in his arms. Turned out the things could be stopped with a single touch, which was either poor planning on Loki’s end or a rare act of mercy. And Tony, for whatever reason, felt slightly guilty for punching the Bard, so he took it upon himself to try to set the statue back up. The base was a mess, though, and would need repairs, so after fighting with both the statue and its base for a time, he propped the figure up between the pedestal and the nearest tree.

“Sorry, Bill. You look good, though. Surprisingly little bird shit on you. And I heard that Cap took Alexander Hamilton’s head clean off with his shield, so you made out okay.”

“I could renew the spell, if it would ease your conscience to apologize properly.”

Tony jumped and spun around, startled by Loki’s voice not coming directly through the speakers but from behind him. His immediate reaction upon seeing the smug look on the bastard’s face was to aim a repulsor blast at him. A relatively under-powered one, granted, and it was aimed at his core so as not to do too much damage, but it was an instinctive impulse. One that proved futile anyway, given that the image flickered and then blinked out.

“You asshole,” Tony grumbled, wheeling back around and not at all surprised this time to find what had to be the real Loki standing in front of him, not looking at him and poking at the statue. “Hey, stop that. You can’t just feel up a beloved literary icon like that.”

“I was checking for authenticity. The real poet had a small scar on—”

“Oh, shut the hell up, Loki, you never met Shakespeare and – you know what? That might explain _Hamlet_. I take it back.”

Seeming to lose interest in the sculpture, Loki dropped his hands to his sides and turned back to face Tony, the same enigmatic smile on his face that always made Tony feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.

“I thought you gave up the villain business.”

Loki offered nothing more than a faint shrug in response.

“Seriously. What did you do with the rest of the team?”

“Why do you think I have anything to do with their sudden absence?” When Tony just glared, Loki rolled his eyes. “Well, my previous idea of removing ourselves from their environment didn’t pan out, clearly, so I decided I should remove them from our environment.”

“Remove—” Tony cut his words off with an irritated shake of his head. “The hell do you mean, ‘remove them from’ – Loki, what did you do?”

“I told you already, they are well. Undoubtedly angry and confused, but unharmed. You should consider that a blessing.”

“Loki . . .”

“Why must I prove my intentions to you time and time again? The fact I haven’t killed you yet should be proof enough of my sincerity.”

“Don’t get all butt-hurt because someone’s finally calling you out on your lying shtick, jackass. Those people happen to be my teammates and my friends. I like you. But if you think I won’t crack your head open if you hurt them—”

“Oh, I would like to see you try,” Loki interrupted, teeth flashing in a threatening sneer. He stepped closer, fully aware of how Tony straightened his back, accounting for the height difference that was only marginally lessened by the suit. The faceplate lifted and Loki reached into the mask to stroke the back of his fingers across Tony’s cheek. “You must be aware by now that my fondness for you makes your threats unnecessary. Your teammates live because they are dear to you. And _you_ , my _gerpir_ , hold some meaning to me. Until such time as that’s no longer the case, you needn’t concern yourself.”

Loki reached into his coat and pulled a small black box from . . . somewhere. The thing was like the Tardis, Tony was sure of it, because Loki routinely pulled things out of it that shouldn’t (and couldn’t) fit by the rules of any known universe.

“Let me guess. Pandora’s Box?”

“Don’t be so dense. You obviously aren’t going to take me at my word, which, annoying as it is, is actually showing a good deal of sound judgment on your part, for once.”

The edge of a short fingernail worked its way under the tiny gold clasp on the front of the box, releasing it so that Loki’s hand could fit over the lid and pull it back.

Tony wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but tiny LEGO-sized versions of the Avengers weren’t anywhere close to being on the list of possibilities.

“As you can see,” Loki continued like he wasn’t holding a _box of humans_ , “they are entirely safe.”

“They . . . you’re joking, right? That’s not really them. Those are illusions.”

Loki reached in and pulled a miniature Captain America out, pinching the back of his uniform between the tips of his thumb and forefinger.

“No. They are quite real, in fact.”

Tony gaped. What – how could he possibly respond to this? What was the _right_ response? Part of him wanted to deck Loki. Part of him wanted to get him to reverse the spell or whatever was going on, _then_ deck him. What won out, because Tony never changed, was a sharp laugh that he halfheartedly tried to cover with his hand.

“Oh my God. Steve, look at you! Look at your tiny little shield! Oh man, please tell me that when they talk, they sound like Alvin the Chipmunk.”

“At this size, I’m reasonably sure their vocal cords can’t be reproduced accurately enough to replicate human speech.”

Okay, that wasn’t nearly as cute, and Tony went from cooing and waving his fingers at Tiny Steve to glaring at Big Loki. Whatever.

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

“It’s possible. But again, I would like to assure you that your friends are completely safe. Their . . . habitat,” he added after a moment of turning the box around in his hand, “is absolutely soundproof. They also can’t see out of it. Once we’ve had our fill of each other, I will release the spell and they will return to their ordinary forms with no ill effects.”

“But they’ll still remember being shrunk and put in a box, which you then carried around with you while propositioning me.”

“Are you suggesting I alter their memories? I could do that, but that kind of magic is a little trickier and—”

“No, Loki, God. No, I am _not_ suggesting that,” Tony groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. “Let me get this straight. You really organized a hostile takeover of several minor landmarks to get the team out, then you zapped ‘em with your mojo or whatever it is that you do, shrunk them, put them in a box, and all just so we could . . . what? Watch _Shaun of the Dead_ all the way through without interruption?”

“You’ve shown me that one already.”

Tony blinked. And again.

“I am dating an honest-to-god sociopath.”

There was the return of that Cheshire grin as Loki dropped Tiny Steve back into the box. Tony glanced down and saw him angrily brushing himself off while Tiny Clint pointed and laughed just before Loki put the lid back in place and fixed the latch.

“Shall we return to your tower? I have a safe house nearby, if you prefer.”

“You really don’t see what’s so wrong with this, do you?”

“Are you upset over your mechanical servant being disrupted? I’ll restore access just as soon as—”

Tony waved his hands. “Loki. Loki, no. Kidnapping and whatever the hell you would call this, those are not methods of foreplay. Not for me. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to let the Avengers out of your little magic box there.”

“But—”

“I want you to get farther from here than Thor can fly in a matter of seconds,” Tony continued, speaking over Loki’s flustered objections, “and I want you to reverse the spell. I’ll run interference to buy you some time, but that’s as far as it goes. We clear?”

Loki’s earlier childish glee gave way to disappointment, giving him the distinct air of a sullen brat ready to go sulk in his room. Only problem with that was that when Loki sulked, there was typically a lot of ensuing property damage.

“Very well. But don’t expect me to try to solve your problems again, Stark.”

“My . . .? I didn’t tell you to do any of this, you freak!”

Loki ignored him as he bent to place the box on the ground, unlatching it again and then stepping back. For a brief, terrifying instant, Tony could practically hear Loki’s thoughts pushing him toward stepping down to snuff out the entire team at once – ants and boots and all that, and wouldn’t _that_ be a plot twist – but he backed away, turned a heated glare on Tony, and then flicked his wrist, shattering into thousands of points of green-tinged light that shimmered briefly before disappearing entirely.

And Tony, for the most part, almost managed to keep from laughing as he carefully lifted each Avenger out of the box.

“I’m so sorry, guys,” he muttered, reaching out to pat Hulk’s back and then jerking his hand away when the Hulk immediately moved to bite his finger. “Hey! This wasn’t my idea!”

They might not have been able to make human noises at that size, but the Hulk could still try to roar. It sounded nothing like his usual chill-inducing howl, but rather like the whistle of a tea kettle from a distant part of a house.

The spell broke unexpectedly right as Tony was trying very, very hard not to laugh at tea-kettle-Hulk. Thanks to the close proximity and abrupt change in scale, most of the Avengers ended up tangled up among one another. Someone (Clint, from the sounds of it) asked Thor to please remove Mjolnir from where it was jutting uncomfortably into his spine. Natasha looked unnervingly serene, even though Tony was absolutely certain she was plotting new and inventive ways to murder him.

“So, uh. Welcome back.”

 _Very_ inventive ways.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After leaving a passive-aggressive note stuck to the refrigerator like a dim, rebellious teenager, Tony heaved a single packed duffel bag over his shoulder and took the private jet to a small private island in French Polynesia.

What Loki had failed to realize – or maybe he realized it all along and just neglected to tell Tony – was that the Avengers couldn’t speak in their miniaturized forms, but they could sure as hell hear. He’d gone to all the trouble of soundproofing the box, presumably to minimize the trauma of the Mini-Avengers overhearing one of their own getting busy with their primary enemy. He’d blacked out the box to keep them from seeing. But somehow, it never occurred to him that leaving the lid open to explain his plan to Tony defeated his purpose altogether. 

The resulting debriefing had been tense, to say the very least.

“You and . . . him, huh?” Bruce asked Tony after that disastrous post-ops meeting. He was the first one to break the  unofficial exile-via-silence the team had imposed on Tony, but that also might have had something to do with Tony holing himself up in the workshop to avoid interacting with another human being. Bruce found him, naturally, and made a peace offering by way of greasy burgers and fries. He knew the surest way to Tony’s heart was to clog the arteries supporting it.

Tony had tried to explain. Well, no, first he’d tried to lead the conversation elsewhere, luring Bruce with new security upgrades and a first peek at the enhanced Widow’s Bite he was constructing for Natasha. When that failed, he tried to engage Bruce in an _Always Sunny_ marathon. That failed, too.

“Look, Tony,” Bruce started after a long period of awkward quiet, picking at the remains of the fries Tony hadn’t stolen from him. For a guy who was most likely immortal thanks to the Hulk, Bruce was strangely health-conscious. “I’m not judging.”

Tony looked up from the cylinder of the Widow’s Bite and raised an eyebrow. Bruce ducked his head.

“Okay, I am. But not for the reasons you think. I think . . .” And here he trailed off, abandoning the fries in order to twist the paper wrapper from his drink straw. “I don’t think anyone’s really, truly completely good or completely bad. I’m also a big proponent of second chances. Maybe someone like Loki really can change. I don’t know. All I know is that from what I’ve seen, from watching him get his kicks by tearing Thor apart over and over? I don’t think it’s likely to happen.”

Which was a point Tony had already considered many times, so he had nothing to contribute but a silent nod.

“I mean, he and Thor are _how_ old again? Thor said they were brought up together as children, so they’ve known each other for many, many centuries. But he turned on Thor and treats him like he does. Who’s to say he won’t get bored and turn on you? Tomorrow, a week from now, a year. What happens then?”

“I’m not planning on marrying him, Bruce,” Tony pointed out as he washed down the last bite of his cheeseburger with a swig of beer. “If I were, though, you’d be my best man. Just fyi.”

“Thanks,” Bruce answered, smiling wanly. “I’m just worried about how this all goes down for you. I think the rest of the team is, too, even if they’re more concerned with the ethical problems right now.”

That, in fact, was a gross understatement.

Tony spent the next two days being absolutely cold-shouldered by everyone who wasn’t Bruce or a robot. Thor, his solitary guaranteed wingman, had fucked off back to Asgard for some new crisis or other, leaving Tony to bear the full brunt of his team’s disapproval. It wasn’t like Tony wasn’t used to disappointing everyone around him; it was just new to actually care about that disapproval and to feel guilt over it.

That was how date four happened, as much another attempt as it was a simple act of retreat.

After leaving a passive-aggressive note stuck to the refrigerator like a dim, rebellious teenager, Tony heaved a single packed duffel bag over his shoulder and took the private jet to a small private island in French Polynesia. Another one of his bored impulse buys from several years back, and outside of having a comparatively modest house built on the eastern shore, Tony hadn’t thought about it much. Buying an island was just one of those things eccentric rich people did, and he just happened to check it off the bucket list a little earlier than most.

There were many problems with purchasing an entire island, naturally, foremost among them being residual guilt over the indigenous people who would have been displaced anyway by money-hungry government authorities. Tony didn’t feel eccentric enough to establish some kind of reservation or anything so macabre on his new island, so he tried to appease the white man’s guilt by finding out where the original inhabitants of the island were living after being forced to leave sometime in the mid-eighties. He privately financed a few schools and a hospital, but visiting with kids in the Iron Man suit had the biggest effect. Figured.

So, years later, he finally had a reason to check out the island he’d bought sight-unseen while researching hangover cures online. Not bad, he thought, once he stepped off the hired ferry and sank into the warm sand; that was another problem: he had to fly in to a neighboring island that already had an airstrip, then make his own way to Isle de Stark. He’d have to ask Pepper sometime for a cool French name to replace the de facto Spanish one he’d made up for lack of a better one.

He made his way up the beach toward the house, a simple one-story affair that was more windows than anything. He’d asked an assistant a week earlier to make sure the house was prepped, and he was happy to see upon arrival that there were fresh baskets of fruit and local flowers placed here and there, a fully stocked kitchen, and clean linens in the bedrooms.

Sea salt lingered in the air, mixing with the scent of the fruit and flowers, and Tony sighed in contentment as he opened the double French doors leading out onto the front patio. Gulls circled overhead before disappearing behind the tree line. Waves crashed in on the shore, providing the only noise beyond the occasional bird call. Yeah. This was a good investment.

Dropping his bag by the door, he walked into the kitchen and typed in Loki’s ( _his_ ) number in his cell phone.

_I’m here. Sending coordinates now. Bring a towel, your appetite, and your sex drive. Towel optional._

Loki hadn’t even questioned him the night before when, slightly tipsy, he’d sent a text asking Loki to meet him at a location “to be determined” the following night. No doubt, Loki was expecting something more predictable like another restaurant or one of the many homes Tony had scattered around the world (which wasn’t actually the case, but Tony wasn’t in the habit of disappointing anyone who fully bought into his playboy image).

The way Tony saw it, Loki had been right in his theory that they needed to remove themselves from the Avengers’ environment. As usual, he just took an insane, ass-backwards approach to putting that idea into action. He had a tendency to do that. So Tony, being the enterprising sort, took it upon himself to incorporate those ideas into a less extreme plan. It was probably a bad sign that the _less_ extreme option involved a private island in the South Pacific, but Loki and Tony weren’t interested in each other’s subtlety.

Grabbing a banana and an orange from the fruit bowl near the door, Tony walked out onto the patio and dropped down onto a chair facing the beach. He’d just swallowed the first bite when his ears popped from the subtle change in air pressure that he’d come to associate with Loki disappearing into or popping out of thin air. Some kind of localized dimensional pocket Tony was still trying to figure out, because fuck magic. It had a scientific basis that was beyond current human understanding, that was _all_. None of this hocus-pocus Merlin crap.

Loki appeared a few feet to Tony’s right, dressed in dark brown trousers in buttery soft leather that Tony imagined would feel spectacular riding against his bare crotch if he pinned Loki against the wall of the house for an impromptu heavy make-out session. Up top, Loki wore a simple homespun shirt in a dove gray color with deep crimson trim embroidered at the cuffs. It was split into a deep V-neck that flashed a generous expanse of pink-pale chest. His hair lay in soft waves and was held tucked neatly behind his ears.

He looked like he’d recently been fucked and was ready to go again, quite honestly, and yeah, Tony might have gaped at him a little. Or a lot.

“It’s impolite to stare, Tony.”

“Like that doesn’t totally do it for you.”

Loki, bless his evil little heart, _tried_ to offer a coy smile. It came off less “schoolboy blushing over his first crush” and more “schoolboy copping his first feel.” It was infectious, actually, and Tony couldn’t help but return it.

“Glad you could make it.”

“I’m glad you used a less dramatic form of contact.”

“Yeah, well.” Tony shrugged and tossed the orange to him. “Subtlety ain’t my bag.”

Loki caught the fruit while barely even looking, showoff. He seemed more interested in checking out his surroundings.

“Where have you brought me?”

The question itself was innocent and Loki deflected attention from his own suspiciousness by going back to watching his fingers as they tugged at the orange rind, but Tony knew him better. He wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have just taken Tony at his word and traveled to an unknown location without several escape plans ready for deployment at any moment.

“Paradise, my friend,” Tony answered, throwing his arms out wide and flashing a winning grin. “Near Tahiti, if that means anything to you. If not, you can look forward to balmy, tropical temperatures, warm sunshine, pristine beaches, and my permission – no, my encouragement – to walk around without a single stitch of clothing. Maybe a hat, though, ‘cause sunburn would put a real damper on my plans for you.”

Loki’s face pinched up, so Tony hurried to smooth over one of those unpredictable mood swings before it got out of hand.

“Or not. If you’ve found religion or modesty or something lately, you can cover yourself head to toe if you want.” Loki still didn’t answer, but his scowl pointed out toward the beach was telling enough. “You don’t like the beach.”

“I thought Thor would have delighted in telling you.”

“That you’re not a beach bum? Why would he? Anyway, I really try to avoid talking to him about you. He gets really moody and depressed about it, and seeing him turn into Eeyore is kind of disturbing. Plus he always looks like someone just set his puppy on fire and then kicked it into oncoming traffic.”

When Loki turned back to face Tony, annoyance stitched into every line of his face, Tony could almost swear that he saw a flash of red. It must have been the light, he decided, because when he blinked, Loki’s eyes went back to the same blue-green shade they always were.

“We, uh, we can go somewhere else . . .?”

Loki ripped the orange peel away and tossed it into a low-lying hedge next to the patio. Tony held his breath and waited, then let it out in an exasperated sigh when Loki said nothing and just sank his teeth into the orange.

“For God’s sake, Loki. Quit being so bitchy and just tell me what’s wrong, okay? I can’t fix it if I don’t know—”

“There is nothing to _fix_ , Stark,” Loki shot back, and it might have been more intimidating if the fruit in his mouth didn’t make him slur his words enough to be slightly comical. “Nothing you can do, at any rate.”

“Do they not have beaches on Asgard? You have a bad encounter with a shark while on a family vacation when you were a kid? What?”

Loki blinked slowly and wavered, swaying minutely from side to side, and Tony sat up straighter in response.

“Hey, you all right?” Loki glanced up with his brow furrowed in obvious confusion, eyes slightly glassy. Tony stood up. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” Loki snapped, waving off Tony’s hands when he reached forward to steady him. “It’s the weather. I don’t do well with heat.”

“Oh. Well, wanna go inside? I actually don’t know if there’s air conditioning, but it’s probably cooler in—”

Tony stopped short, making a noise of concern when Loki gasped and squeezed the orange hard enough to send pulp and juice oozing through the cracks between his fingers. Determined to help, Tony ignored Loki’s feeble attempts to evade him and grabbed his elbow.

“Seriously, Loki, you’re starting to freak me out. Are you getting sick? What’s wrong?”

He watched, alarmed, as Loki’s breathing grew increasingly labored. Tony stepped closer, only to be shoved back hard enough to send him toppling over his chair.

“I am _suffocating_ , you idiot. Stay away.”

“I think you might be overreacting just a little—”

Which wasn’t the right thing to say – was _never_ the right thing to say – and Loki expressed as much by snarling at Tony and then teleporting his suffocating ass on out of there. Tony stared in dismay at the empty space where Loki had been standing just seconds before, then groaned and dropped back onto the sun-warmed stone of the patio beneath him.

He gave Loki the benefit of the doubt, waited around for two more days for the princess to get over his latest hissy fit over some unknown offense Tony had committed. When he didn’t show, Tony said the hell with it and went home, though not before getting drunk with some locals in Bora Bora.

Tony officially swore off dating the second he stepped off the plane and remembered he’d left his phone – the back-up to the one Loki had stolen – on a bed that had never been used in a house he forgot he had on an island he’d bought for kicks, all because of Loki and his endless issues.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Imagine my surprise when I arrange nice romantic getaway on a private island where only the wildlife can judge us for our depravity and unorthodox positions. My unstable but smoking hot boyfriend shows up, has a heat stroke or something, and then just vanishes without a word. Doesn’t even try to contact me. Two weeks later, I show up in some backwater wannabe renfaire and, surprise, there’s the boyfriend who is not, in fact, dead of heat exhaustion.”

The thing about being a “hero” – the hardest concept for Tony to wrap his head around when he was used to results and immediate gratification – was that every victory was only temporary. One power-hungry idiot got taken down only for two more to crop up, and that felt too much like failure for Tony’s comfort 

And then there were the times when enemies fought amongst themselves. On paper, that was an ideal situation. In practice, it was worse than just fighting a single enemy; after all, villains didn’t care about casualties and anyone caught between them. That created an especially volatile situation that often resulted in even more property damage and loss of life. And _that_ , in turn, made an even bigger mess to clean up afterward.

The most recent bout of hot villain-on-villain action involved an alliance gone sour between Dr. Doom and Hydra. Turned out that von Doom didn’t appreciate Madam Hydra’s attempt at double-crossing him before he could stab _her_ in the back (which was odd enough in its own right, given that Doom tended to be strangely chivalrous with his allies). As a result, there was a small army of Doombots squaring off against an even larger contingent of Hydra agents, and though Clint made a compelling argument in favor of eating popcorn and heckling both sides until they destroyed each other, the Avengers ended up getting involved once Doomstadt itself seemed in danger of being destroyed.

From the time the jet landed two hours ago to now, Tony had decided that he officially despised Latveria and wouldn’t be sad to see it completely razed and turned into another Euro-Disney site.

He banked hard to the left to send an aerobot crashing into the side of a building that looked like it had been dropped out of a bad adaptation of a Dickens novel. Maybe Tony could raze Doomstadt himself that way. Doom had finally gotten the hang of incorporating flight in his machines, but he still gave them far too much credit in assuming they could maneuver with any degree of intelligence. That was at least the ninth robot Tony had disposed of in exactly the same way; it almost felt like playing dirty by then.

Tony glanced behind him to catch the latest circuitry-fueled fireworks display – that was a good feeling – and slowed down into a slow drift through anachronistic cobblestone alleyways.

“Hey, JAR. Scale of one to ten: how pissed you think Doom would be if we forced him to rebuild in a style less than a couple centuries old?”

“Don’t, Tony,” Steve warned through the com. “S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t want to be on the hook for more damage than what’s absolutely necessary.”

“Why, JARVIS, you’re sounding especially American today. And boring.”

An explosion just around the corner sent shockwaves vibrating through the Iron Man suit, though JARVIS piped up immediately to report that no actual damage had been sustained.

“Tony—”

“That wasn’t me.”

But it seemed like a good idea to flee the scene of the crime just in case, so Tony lifted higher into the air to clear the alley and see over the peaked roofs of the cute little village motif Doomstadt had going for it.

And there, gleefully stabbing and kicking everything in sight, was Loki, poised on the slanted roof of a tavern with a pile of bodies and dismantled robots scattered around him.

“Son of a bitch,” Tony muttered, dropping onto the far end of the roof to watch. Loki really was fascinating like this, every movement gracefully flowing into the next so that he appeared to be carrying out an elaborate, violent dance routine. It was a bit like watching Natasha when she fought, though she was more efficient; Loki, ever the showman, liked adding flair and style to his motions.

Thor had mentioned once during a pre-battle strategy session that Loki wasn’t considered much of a warrior on Asgard, that he was easier to handle at close range than when he had room to use his magic from a safe distance. This, despite his obvious skill with short blades and that he was as deadly and precise as a cobra. Watching him from such a close vantage point, Tony decided that Thor was full of shit.

Loki spun without any apparent effort, pivoting on his heel and throwing his arm out with a dagger pointed behind him. The momentum of the turn put enough forced behind the knife to drive it cleanly into the throat of the unfortunate Hydra goon trying to sneak up on him. Tony winced sympathetically as the agent, stunned and disoriented, struggled with the knife and stepped right off the edge of the building in his panic.

Loki, meanwhile, never broke stride. Magic swirling around him in a green aura, he conjured another dagger from nothing, flipped it to hold it by the blade, and then sent it flying end over end to dig into the unprotected eye socket of a sniper aiming at him from a neighboring rooftop. Tony barely had time to track the movement before Loki held out his hand to call the dagger back to him, still slick with blood and gore, and propelled himself forward to grab onto a shield-toting robot from behind. The robot twisted frantically to rid itself of the unfamiliar weight, to no avail; Loki stabbed it in the back and used the hilt as leverage to hold on. He circled an arm around the machine’s head and wrenched it from the body with a small shower of sparks and wires. Without wasting a second to breathe, he rode the Doombot as it fell, planted his feet against the back, pulled his dagger free, and kicked off into a forward roll just before the robot crashed. Coming out of the roll, Loki flung both arms out, a dagger now in each hand, and hamstrung two Hydra agents desperately trying to get a bead on him with their rifles.

Tony watched in unmasked awe as Loki continued to take out wave after wave of enemies, magic thick in the air and charging it with something like static. Loki was little more than a blur of green, gold, and black, frenzied and every bit as much a berserker as Tony had ever imagined a Viking to be. Blood dripped from his blades and smeared over his armor, but if he noticed, he didn’t appear to care.

By the time Hydra either redirected to another threat or ran out of cannon fodder, half the rooftop was littered with the aftermath of a very one-sided battle. Loki stood among the carnage with an expression that no one would have considered sane: he was breathing heavily with exertion, mouth hanging open, eyes flitting wildly from point to point as he turned in a slow circle to meet any new dangers.

He stopped when he found Tony.

“Man, I have the weirdest boner right now.”

Loki blinked and tilted his head like he couldn’t quite decide (or remember) if Tony was a serious threat.

“I mean, you can’t tell right now ‘cause of . . .” Tony trailed off, rapping his knuckles against the crotch of the suit until the metal banged loudly enough for Loki to hear. “But trust me, it’s there.”

“Why are you here?”

Tony popped the faceplate and began walking forward – slowly, because while he was confident in his superior craftsmanship, Loki had still made quick work of Doom’s vanguard with frightening ease.

“I fight bad guys, remember? Just so happens the bad guys are here. Plus, I heard Latveria’s hosting some kind of Oktoberfest knockoff. I was intrigued.”

“And are you here to fight me?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

He stepped over the husk of a Doombot, its circuitry ripped free and tossed a few feet away. Poor guy. Loki kept wary eyes on him the entire time, clearly ready to either kill or run. Maybe both.

“So imagine my surprise when I arrange nice romantic getaway on a private island where only the wildlife can judge us for our depravity and unorthodox positions. My unstable but smoking hot boyfriend – pun fully intended and I’m not apologizing for it – shows up, has a heat stroke or something, and then just vanishes without a word. Doesn’t even try to contact me. Two weeks later, I show up in some backwater wannabe renfaire and, surprise, there’s the boyfriend who is not, in fact, dead of heat exhaustion.”

Loki’s nostrils flared as he worked up his usual righteous indignation, but Tony rode right over top of him.

“So you tell me, Loki: what are _you_ doing here?”

Yep, there it was, that angry flash in his eyes.

“How dare you interrogate me when my motivations are none of your concer—”

“Wrong, asshole. When your motives involve, say, eating cereal straight from the box because you forgot to buy milk and all the bowls are dirty, or going without sleep for two days because you accidentally wound up on TV Tropes, yeah, what you do on your own time is your business. When you go off the radar and show up again on a one-man rampage in a shady fairytale dictatorship, you’re damn right your motivations are my concern.” Tony set his jaw and tipped his face up, silently lamenting that Loki was _still_ taller even with the extra bulk from the suit. “ _You’re_ my concern, Loki, and I hate you for making me say stupid shit like that.”

Another line formed on Loki’s forehead.

“Why are you here, anyway? I thought you and Doom were tight.”

“Hydra stole something of value to me on his orders.”

“Which was . . .?”

“A valuable tome from Asgard’s archives.”

Tony gaped, not even trying to hide his astonishment. “Are you serious? All this is over a book?”

The look Loki shot him was the perfect blend of disgust and disappointment in the endless depths of his stupidity. “It is a collection of lore of unimaginable power, the likes of which you couldn’t possibly understand and which Victor, skilled sorcerer as he is, couldn’t hope to wield. I rather did your world a favor.”

“I take it that means you got it back.” Loki smiled faintly and nodded. “Well, that’s one crisis averted, I guess, even though I’m not really sold on the wisdom of leaving it with you, either.”

“I have no designs on this pitiful world, Stark. Certainly none that require the amount of effort and energy needed for those spells.”

“That’s only slightly more reassuring, knowing Earth’s safety relies on how lazy you’re feeling on any given day.”

That was the last thing Tony said or heard before the world exploded.

Fine, maybe that was too dramatic, but he couldn’t think of another more accurate way to describe the abrupt sensation of having his footing ripped out from under him to send him tumbling into the gap opened into the roof, then through a hole in the floor, until he landed hard on the concrete base of the cellar. Once he remembered how to breathe again, he pushed away a broken ceiling beam on his chest and sat up.

“Ow. What the hell was that?”

He tipped his head back to stare up through the hole above him. Only a portion of the early evening sky was visible through the twisted rafters. Enormous, heavy wooden beams framed the opening in great broken slivers, hanging down like threatening icicles ready to impale the unsuspecting. Sawdust and shattered plaster drifted through the air to obscure the dimly lit interior. Tables, chairs, and half the bar top lay crushed beneath the weight of the remains of several Doombots. Another hung rigidly over the edge of the hole in the floor, its chest torn open by –

“It would appear,” Loki muttered from Tony’s left, angrily pushing away barrels of overturned alcohol from where they had landed on him, “the robots were equipped with self-destruct mechanisms.”

“You think?” Tony shot back, flexing his wrist to check for damage after having used it to break his fall.

Loki eventually emerged from his would-be grave of kegs (which would have been fitting, had their positions been reversed) and stepped over the debris to close the distance. He knelt at Tony’s side and reached for his wrist, energy already sparking at his fingers.

“Are you injured?”

“No, just my pride,” Tony answered while pulling his hand out of Loki’s grasp. “Oh, God. You smell like a brewery.”

Loki sniffed and threw out an agitated hand to indicate their surroundings. “We are in a tavern, if that’s somehow managed to escape your attention.”

“Yeah, but you—” Tony turned to get a better look at Loki and immediately burst into laughter. “You look ridiculous.”

Whatever amount of awe Loki had previously inspired in the midst of his battle rage was replaced with an image of a tall, gangly alien soaked in booze until it dripped from his coat and pooled on the floor beneath him. His hair was damp and matted against his skull, and the fine particles of building material snowing down on them coated him in a fine, dull white powder.

“You look like a drug kingpin and you smell like you’ve been marinating in beer.” Tony scooted closer, eyebrows wagging. “I have never been so turned on in my life.”

Loki rolled his eyes and turned his head, but not quickly enough to keep Tony from seeing his mouth quirk up into a small grin.

“Stark, you copy?”

Clint’s voice inside the helmet made Tony remember that, yeah, this probably wasn’t the best time to flirt.

“Copy.”

“Heard an explosion and Widow said it came from your direction.”

“Why is it that whenever anything blows up or catches fire, everyone automatically assumes it’s my fault?”

“I was checking on you, you ungrateful jackass. Also, it usually _is_ your fault.”

“All part of the scientific process.”

Clint snorted and then went quiet, his end of the conversation temporarily giving way to the sound of arrows whizzing past. A Doombot let out a death knell of screeches and beeps somewhere close enough for Clint’s com to pick up.

“You need help?” Clint asked.

“No, I’m fine. You good?”

“Yeah. Mostly cleanup work at this point. Maybe more if these Hydra morons don’t stop taunting Hulk.”

“Sounds fun.”

“It’s kind of fun to watch, honestly. He’s using some unit commander as a club right now. Shit, that looks painful. I’m gonna go in for a better view. Yell if you need help.”

“Roger,” Tony half-laughed just before shutting off his microphone.

“Some champion you are. Trapped with your enemy and you send your teammates away.”

“Yeah, well, you’re pretty low on the hit list right now, considering. Second, I’m not trapped. Suit’s still fully functional.”

“Your masters have very poor judgment indeed if they believe me to be a lesser threat than this badly trained and unorganized band of mercenaries.” Loki cast his eyes up to the remains of the first floor. “And if you attempt to blast your way out, you’re going to bring this entire structure down. Do I need to remind you there are homes attached to this building?”

“Or you could just magic us out.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because if Fury rips my balls off for knowingly destroying some peasant’s house and livelihood, that directly and negatively affects you.”

“Spoken as though yours is the only bed I share.”

Tony shrugged and pushed himself up onto his feet. “If you were getting better from someone else, you wouldn’t keep coming to me.” He paused and met Loki’s gaze, and the despairing look on Loki’s face meant he knew what was next. “Or coming _for_ me.”

“A pity my fondness for you prevents me from fastening your jaws closed.”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation recently, but you love my mouth too much for that.”

Loki turned his back and blinked out of sight.

“Hey!”

“Stop shouting. I’m right here.”

Tony looked up to see Loki peering down at him through the broken floor. He also appeared cleaner, probably due largely to having changed into his less formal garb during the jump.

“Oh. Uh, in that case, wanna give me a hand?” Loki seemed to honestly consider the question before nodding and bending to offer his hands. “Or two. That works.”

Stepping up onto a broken crate, Tony reached up to grasp Loki’s forearms. After a bit of swearing and a near fall on a pile of alcohol-soaked rubble, Tony made it onto the main floor. The inside of the tavern had escaped more damage than he’d expected, with the upper floor evidently having taken the brunt of the explosions. Maybe it just looked better in relative darkness, given that the power had been knocked out before the Avengers had even arrived – and that was assuming Doom even allowed electricity to ruin Doomstadt’s pseudo-Romantic image.

“Well this is . . . quaint,” Tony muttered. “You think Doom wanted your Hogwarts textbook to create electricity?”

“The city has electricity, Stark.”

“But the oil lamps on the tables—”

“Are largely decorative.” Tony cast a sidelong glance at Loki, who shrugged without any hint of shame. “I’ve spent some time in this area securing contacts.”

“Super secret villain stuff, then.”

“Victor’s methods are questionable, I admit, but his aims are just.”

“Says the guy who tried to take over the planet a couple years ago.”

“You don’t still honestly believe that, do you?”

“You took a pretty good stab at it.”

“Had I truly intended to rule this barely civilized rock, I would have done so.”

“Yeah, that’s totally what I told myself too before I had your Wile E. Coyote imprint in my floor fixed.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed to irritated slits of green, but Tony only smiled winningly and brushed past him.

“You know what I’m thinking?”

“Nothing of importance.”

“Cute. No, I’m thinking that for once, we have a little time to ourselves. We have an empty building with all the goodies we need, the team’s busy . . . we should have that date we’ve been trying to have for weeks now.”

Loki cast a wary look at the ceiling, his attention drawn to the ominously creaking beams around the hole. “In a building that could fall down around us at any time?”

“Okay, maybe it’s not the most structurally sound arrangement, but I’m in the suit and you’re . . . you, so we’ll be fine. Relax, Chicken Little.”

Loki still seemed ready to argue, but he kept quiet as he trailed along behind Tony while they carefully picked their way through debris on their way to the kitchen in the back of the bar.

“Whoa,” Tony breathed as soon as he got his first look at the prep area. “This is pretty high quality stuff for a place that still un-ironically calls itself a tavern.”

Stainless steel appliances lined the walls, positioned among several large ovens and granite-covered countertops. Copper pots and pans hung from ornate racks fixed to the ceiling, and heavy cast iron skillets sat out on the stovetops, ready for use.

Loki had no comment on that, instead just watching in silence as Tony hit the manual release of the suit to allow him to step out of it, then headed into the large walk-in cooler at the back of the kitchen.

“You said before that you didn’t know how to cook.”

“Actually, I just hinted that I’m lazy, not that I don’t know how to cook,” Tony called over his shoulder. “Turns out I’m not completely helpless.”

When he walked out of the cooler with his arms full of fresh fish and vegetables, Loki raised his eyebrows and then, very slowly, smiled in open appreciation.

“I do enjoy surprises.”

“Then prepare to be stunned, baby. Do me a favor and take the fish before I drop it.” Loki did as asked, setting the striped bass aside on a cutting board while Tony began unloading his collection of vegetables into the sink. “You’d better hope this stuff runs on gas, or else I’m gonna have to introduce you to sushi.”

The grill, thankfully, came to life immediately once Tony found the right knobs to turn.

“Sweet. Uh, could you do the honors of prepping the fihs? I don’t do scales. Or food that watches me when I cook it.” One corner of Loki’s mouth twisted into a half-smirk. “I don’t wanna hear it. Maybe in space Viking land you’re used to chasing your dinner through the wilderness and killing it with your bare hands, but down here on this ‘barely civilized rock,’ we like our food presented a little more nicely.”

“Of course. Anything to protect your delicate sensibilities.”

Tony snorted and shook his head as he began washing a handful of carrots. “If you were that worried about my sensibilities, our sex life would be a lot less interesting.”

“You’ve never voiced concerns over that.”

“I’m pretty sure I told you once after the third round that if you didn’t stop trying to get me up again for another go, I was going to kick you right in the face.”

Loki smiled indulgently, clearly pleased by the memory, and Tony couldn’t help but smile as well. He’d been thoroughly exhausted by then, wrung out and utterly spent, and yet Loki and his damned alien recovery time left him ready to go almost immediately. As Tony groaned and squirmed under Loki’s ceaseless determination to coax some life back into his already overly sensitive dick, Tony was reminded of exactly why he’d stopped messing around with men considerably younger than he was. Too depressing. Alien stamina just made matters that much worse.

Moving vegetables from the sink to the counter as they were rinsed, Tony kept stealing glances at Loki, watching him from the corner of his eye. He seemed strangely at ease in this even stranger domestic scene, humming softly to himself while he expertly wielded the deadly-looking knife in his hand with the practiced ease of someone who had spent a lot of time descaling fish. Contentment looked odd on Loki, who was always hungry for something, always pushing for more. Tony cherished the little moments when Loki actually let himself relax, in the too brief moments immediately following orgasm, when he smiled for no reason and trailed his fingertips in lazy, mindless patterns across Tony’s back or his own stomach, when he kissed freely and without reservation – when his fiercely protected defenses lowered ever so slightly to offer a rare glimpse of what he might have been if fate had been kinder to him.

But what Tony liked even better – and this was particularly surprising for him, given what a high priority he’d always placed on sex – were those even rarer times Loki showed splinters of himself that had nothing to do with how well Tony had pleasured him. The quiet serenity in his face and the lack of tension in his body when he stretched out in his favorite nook in the penthouse to read. The unbridled awe in his eyes when he perfected a new spell or cracked a puzzle bothering him. The excitement and urgency in his voice when he indulged Tony’s curiosity and compared Asgardian “magic” with Midgardian science. The changes were subtle, but Tony loved seeing them regardless. And while he would never be so naïve as to describe Loki as being soft or even nice, there was something unmistakably innocent about those lapses in his guards. Tony was also acutely aware that nearly everything about Loki was a lie and that there was every possibility those treasured moments were only carefully constructed artifice, but he was willing to suspend his disbelief if it meant seeing those parts of Loki – even the false ones – no one else ever got to know.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The knife in Loki’s hand faltered in its smooth glide, just a microsecond of a hitch before it picked up again. “Tell you what?”

“That you’re a frost giant.” Tony gave Loki a once-over and a small grin. “Or a half-giant. Unless ‘giant’ means something else entirely, but don’t expect me to start calling you Loki Giant-Cock or anything.”

The barely audible humming stopped and the peacefulness in Loki’s face and movements surrendered abruptly to rigid alertness.

“Ah. So Thor did tell you.”

“I asked him.” Loki’s jaw twitched and Tony waved a celery stalk at him. “I was worried about you, you paranoid dipshit. You acted like you were dying and then just disappeared. What was I supposed to do? Sit around and hope you weren’t dead because you had a lethal allergy to Earth sand or something?”

Loki didn’t respond at first, seemingly too absorbed in his work to concentrate on forming words. Tony shifted his weight from foot to foot, impatient, until Loki let out a soft breath.

“I assumed Thor had revealed as much already to your masters—”

“Stop calling them that.”

“—and that you were privy to that information.”

Tony stole a plump red grape from a freshly washed bunch, savoring the burst of juice on his tongue as he tried to tease out what Loki meant by what he _wasn’t_ saying. It didn’t take long, knowing Loki’s tendency to suspect everyone of plotting betrayal as often as he did.

_Oh._

“You think I set you up, don’t you?” No reply. “Loki . . .”

“It would have been a sly but effective gamble.”

“It would have been a dick move of the highest order. Jesus, Loki. If I wanted to screw you over, I wouldn’t fucking torture you to do it. I know from experience how that works out for the one doing the torturing.”

Loki kept his eyes down, methodically cutting slashes in the fish along its side.

“Loki. Look at me.” When he kept avoiding eye contact or even any sort of acknowledgment, Tony made a frustrated noise and invited himself into Loki’s personal space. “I mean it. I know how it feels when someone you trust fucks you over in a really bad way and when they use your own nature against you. Yeah, our situations are different, obviously, but betrayal hurts the same no matter who you are.”

Loki’s lips pinched into a thin line and Tony tipped his head to the side to study him. For someone who had outlived most civilizations, Loki could appear to be impossibly young sometimes.

“Don’t give me a reason to throw you to the wolves and I won’t. For some reason, I kind of like you.”

He reached up to cup his palm against the side of Loki’s face, thumb stroking the top of a prominent cheekbone.

“I don’t really know what a frost giant is or why you wouldn’t tell me about it, but if you ever decide to enlighten me, I’d love to know. If not, no problem. We’ll just stay away from tropical islands. How’s that sound?”

Loki closed his eyes for a long while before at long last placing the knife on the cutting board and leaning almost imperceptibly closer.

“That sounds fair.”

He brought his hands up with clear intentions of touching Tony’s face until that same face wrinkled in distaste.

“Hold it. I know you might think it’s hot to smear your lover in the blood of a fresh kill, but I’m not into fish gut facials.”

Loki had a beautiful smile, Tony noticed, and an even more beautiful laugh.

 

As dates went, it wasn’t exactly glamorous. Tony might have overestimated his cooking skills – the fish was a little dry, probably because he got distracted by Loki’s tongue in his mouth and accidentally left dinner on the grill too long. The beer was just as awful as he remembered from the last time he’d been forced to visit Latveria (seriously, that was going to be the extent of his official report once he got back for debriefing: _raze it all, salt the earth, start over_ ), but Loki didn’t seem to mind. The oil lamps on the tables were, in fact, decorative _and_ functional, and it wasn’t exactly a candlelit dinner, but it was a close enough approximation to be awkwardly kind of sweet. Loki didn’t spill any deep secrets about his newly revealed heritage or his thoughts about it, but Tony hadn’t expected him to anything of the sort; if he wanted to at all, Tony could wait.

And if Tony regrouped with his team with messy hair and scratches in curiously intimate places and swollen lips, well, battle wounds.

“Tony, come in.”

Tony flashed a devilish grin over at Loki, who was still glassy eyed and out of breath where he rested on the ground, then decided to let the obvious quip go so that Steve didn’t have a coronary.

“Right here, Cap,” he answered after removing his helmet from the suit and enabling the microphone. “What’s up?”

“New plan. Madame Hydra’s on the move. S.H.I.E.L.D. has men on the ground here to sweep up the Hydra agents still here, but we’ve been ordered to bring her in. Rendezvous at the town square in five.”

“I still can’t believe there’s actually a _town square_ in this place. This must be just like the good old days for you, huh?”

“A little before my time, Stark. Get here ASAP. Over.”

“On my way.”

Tony turned off the microphone once more and set the helmet beside him on the ground, then turned back over to slide his hand around the back of Loki’s neck, pulling him in for another lingering kiss.

“You’d better get out of here too.”

“So I gathered.”

Standing up (and maybe letting Loki help him until his not at all wobbly legs felt steady enough to hold him on their own), Tony grabbed an ink pen from behind the bar and reached for Loki’s hand.

“So this was a good date. I gotta run so I can’t walk you home, but I wanna see you again. Here’s my number – my new one, and don’t be surprised if you keep getting random calls from Pepper and investors for the next couple weeks until they get sorted.” Pulling the cap off the pen with his teeth, he scribbled a barely legible phone number on Loki’s palm, ignoring Loki’s affronted noise of protest. It was the _gesture_. “Call me sometime, okay?”

Loki tilted his head to glance down at the numbers scrawled onto his palm, then crooked an eyebrow at Tony, the same side of his mouth curling up shortly afterward.

“Are you asking me for another date, Mr. Stark?”

“I don’t date,” Tony countered as he stepped back into the Iron Man suit and let it snap into place around him.

“Ah. My mistake.”

“Yeah. If you don’t mind?”

Loki dipped his chin toward his chest in agreement, taking hold of Tony’s shoulder and waving his free hand before them. Between one breath and the next, Tony found himself outside once more, safely out of the tavern without any additional damage he would have caused no matter how careful he tried to be.

“That is never going to stop being the coolest thing ever.”

When he turned to catch Loki’s reaction, he met only empty air.

“That, though? Not so much. Bastard.”

Still, he grinned as he lowered the faceplate and took to the sky.

Hours later, he would check his phone and find a new message waiting for him. It contained no text, only an attached photo of the Iron Man suit’s silhouette against the yellow streetlights. The next morning when he woke up, he would find that he’d missed one call from his old number. And then, grinning stupidly to himself, he would know that the courtship of Loki Laufeyson had officially begun.


End file.
